‘They are my people’: Mayor Cherelle Parker on why she stood firm in the DC 33 city worker strike

During Philadelphia’s divisive eight-day city worker strike that ended early Wednesday morning with a tentative contract agreement largely in line with her goals, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker did what she always does: She refused to fold.

Confident that her offer was “fair and fiscally responsible,” as she repeated throughout the ordeal, Parker barely gave an inch in negotiations. And she went to great lengths — including, controversially, hiring outside contractors to do the work of striking union members — to make clear she would not be caving due to public displeasure with failing city services, a municipal union’s primary leverage during a strike.

Parker’s unyielding approach to negotiations is well-known. But it seemed during the strike that she had finally come up against an equally unyielding counterpart: Greg Boulware, president of District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

As recently as last Monday, the day before the final negotiations that ended the strike began, Boulware said his union would remain on the picket line as long as it would take to win a contract with annual raises of about 5%. Around 36 hours later, Boulware signed a deal that he said “nobody’s happy” with in the union, giving his members raises of 3% per year.

So why was the mayor so confident she could prevail by sticking to her guns?

“District Council 33 — they are me,” Parker said in an interview Friday. “I am District Council 33. They are my people.”

By that, Parker meant two things. First, she believes her humble beginnings growing up in Northwest Philadelphia gave her insight into the needs of the blue-collar workers in DC 33. Second, it was an acknowledgment that DC 33 — the lowest-paid of the four major municipal unions and the only one in which a majority of members are Black — is a key part of her political base, despite her clashes with union leadership.

Whether DC 33’s roughly 9,000 members agree with that sentiment — or the tentative contract — remains to be seen. The frontline workers, including trash collectors, street pavers, and water department employees, returned to work Wednesday and will vote on ratifying the tentative contract agreement this week.

The striking workers were, by almost all accounts, prepared to continue the work stoppage beyond Wednesday, and public support for them was holding steady despite the ever-growing “Parker piles” of trash across the city.

Through it all, Parker stood firm. And based on her first 18 months as mayor, that should have come as no surprise. From battles over school board appointments to tax rates to her unusually strict return-to-office policy, Parker has always refused to back down during her tenure, and it has largely worked out for her.

Even in the one major setback to her administration’s agenda before the strike — the 76ers’ since-abandoned plan to build an arena in Center City — the mayor was able to push an unpopular proposal through an uncomfortable City Council. (In that case, it took the last-minute intervention of Comcast president and CEO Brian L. Roberts and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to deny Parker her objective.)

With the strike in her rearview mirror, Parker on Friday reflected on the most tumultuous eight days of her administration in an interview with The Inquirer. Here are takeaways from the conversation.

Parker’s messaging during the strike prompted many questions. Why, for instance, did she emphasize during a heated news conference on the third day of the strike that Boulware’s salary was higher than hers and question whether the union was misleading its members about her proposal?

And why did she largely go silent after those remarks, forgoing several opportunities to speak about the strike and skipping a planned speech during the Wawa Welcome America concert after headliners LL Cool J and Jazmine Sullivan bowed out in support of the union?

In the interview Friday, Parker declined to address her messaging strategy. Instead, she emphasized that during the strike, she was focused on maintaining city services.

“The one strategy is we had to make sure to be as efficient as we possibly could in setting up a way, a system, standard operating procedure, by how people could drop off their trash,” Parker said. “How could we ensure that police and fire and public safety services continue uninterrupted across the city? Think about water department issues, medical examiner offices.”

Despite dodging questions about her rhetoric, Parker’s answer was revealing when it came to her overall strategy. The goal of a municipal strike is to bring the city to its knees so that the mayor has to make concessions to end it. Parker made clear to union leaders she wasn’t going to do that.

“The point of the strike is to create enough discomfort to get them to meet as many of the demands as we can get them to meet, but at some point, then the threat of the injunction kicks in,” DC 33 attorney Sam Spear said after the strike ended, referring to a potential court order the city could seek to require trash collectors to return to work to protect public health.

» READ MORE: How the AFSCME DC 33 strike exposed fault lines in Philly’s labor movement

It was not inevitable Parker would embrace such aggressive strike-busting tactics. As a self-described “pro-union, pro-labor, pro-worker” politician, Parker might have tried to avoid hiring “scabs,” as labor leaders call outside contractors brought in during strikes. And in the early days of the strike, the union appeared shell-shocked by the administration’s success in securing limited court orders requiring some DC 33 members who perform essential tasks to report to work.

The barrage of litigation began seconds after Boulware declared the strike at 12:01 a.m. on July 1, when City Solicitor Renee Garcia personally served him with an injunction request regarding water department employees.

By the time DC 33 decided to settle, the writing was on the wall: Parker was not going to fold in time for the union to win concessions before the courts might shut the whole thing down, eliminating the workers’ leverage.

“We felt our clock was running out,” Boulware said minutes after ending the strike.

Although Parker achieved her goals in the contract, her tactics likely won’t be soon forgotten in pro-labor circles.

“Aggressive injunctions meant to break a strike and attacking union leaders to divide them from membership is straight from the anti-union playbook,” Councilmember Kendra Brooks said in a statement Friday. “That’s divisive in a pro-union town.”

Parker wants to be remembered as someone who protected the city’s fiscal health, not just as mayor, but dating back to her first job in elected office as a state representative.

For Parker, that record of sound financial decision-making protects city workers from scenarios much worse than failing to win a contract with 5% annual raises: potential layoffs or an insolvent pension fund.

“People can talk about standing in solidarity with our municipal workforce, but I delivered for them long before I became mayor,” she said. “Philadelphia being on solid fiscal ground for the 1.5 million-plus people that we represent — that’s extremely important to me."

She pointed to state laws she helped pass that provided financial assistance for Philadelphia, such as a 2014 extension of a sales tax increase that provided a $120 million lifeline to the school district when it was facing a major deficit. She also helped pass legislation critical to stabilizing the municipal pension fund, which once threatened to cripple the city budget and now is on pace to be fully funded within the decade.

And this year, her negotiating team, led by Chief Deputy Mayor Sinceré Harris, emphasized to DC 33 that although the city currently has a large fund balance, it could evaporate overnight if President Donald Trump makes good on his threats to cut federal funding to cities.

“There’s heightened uncertainty due to the looming possibility of federal funding cuts,” Parker said. “All of those facets [were] considered [in] our calculus as we’re trying to negotiate a fair and fiscally responsible contract with our workforce, and to do it without having to lay off people. I refuse to do that.”

Before the interview ended, Parker wanted to say one more thing.

“I wasn’t going to go here,” Parker said, adding that her staff is “going to be pissed off.”

“There were a whole lot of people who are not members of District Council 33 and not a part of this Parker administration doing everything that they could to fan the flames,” the mayor said.

Parker didn’t name names, but it was not difficult to discern to whom she was referring.

Progressive elected officials on City Council and in the Philadelphia delegation in Harrisburg rallied behind DC 33’s strike, and Parker, a moderate Democrat, on Friday wanted to send a message that their “divide-and-conquer rhetoric and narrative” didn’t work.

It was this line of thought that prompted Parker to emphasize that DC 33 members “are my people.”

» READ MORE: DC 33 strike creates a political quagmire for Philadelphia City Council members

Councilmembers Jamie Gauthier and Rue Landau, Democrats with strong ties to the progressive movement, marched in a DC 33 protest.

State Sen. Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia) said the workers were “demanding what they deserve: wages that allow them and their families to live dignified lives.”

And Councilmembers Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke of the progressive Working Families Party questioned why the administration could not meet the union’s demands when it had just adopted cuts to the city’s business tax.

Parker, who has long championed working-class “middle neighborhoods,” bristles at rhetoric about helping the poor from progressives, many of whom lack her “lived life experience” of growing up poor in Philadelphia. In the 2023 mayor’s race, she defeated candidates who ran to her left, including former Councilmember Helen Gym, who was backed by many of the local politicians who most vocally supported the strike.

“They don’t want [the administration and the union] on the same page because they benefit when there’s discord,” Parker said. “And I know that they were hard at work.”

Parker emphasized that she was not taking aim at DC 33 leaders or members.

“I’m talking about people outside who liked what they saw, who got all the popcorn and said, ‘Oh, we like all of this discord that we’re seeing,’” she said. “You won’t win, because I’m always going to do right for our municipal workforce.”